Businesses wanting to improve their low carbon credentials rely on highly creative people to come up with new ideas. But for those innovators wanting to share their ideas, it can be hard to get projects off the ground. It takes time and money to refine products and business plans – things startups often don’t have. So what help is there for innovators wanting to give up their day jobs and focus on their inventions?

One option is Cleantech Innovate, a biannual event in London and Glasgow where low carbon innovators pitch for £20,000 and get to meet potential investors. Here are some of the exciting innovations that caught the eye at the most recent event this month.

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1. Steamed up

Originally designed for boats, steam infusion cooks huge quantities of food very quickly and evenly, keeping food nutritious and tasty. It works on liquid foods like sauces and soups by blasting them with steam travelling at three times the speed of sound, heating food from 20C to 80C in only a second, and can cook 1000kg of food in just 10 minutes.

Designed by British engineering company OAL Group, steam infusion has been successfully making ready meals, ketchup, béchamel sauce and minestrone soup. It has been used to feed refugees in northern Iraq and to make a new maize-based nutritional drink in Zambia.

2. Insulating robots

Also poised to improve our homes is q-bot, a London startup that has invented a robot that squeezes under floorboards and sprays insulation into areas that no human can reach.

Putting in floor insulation can be very disruptive and takes at least a week. But with this remote-controlled gadget, a whole house can be done in a day. Inventor Mathew Holloway explains: “in many UK homes around one quarter of heat loss is through the floor. If there’s a draught coming up you can’t keep your home warm. q-bot makes it much easier to insulate under the floorboards, which means more people are more likely to have it done.”

It’s great for draughty older buildings – like the 4.6m UK homes built before 1919. London’s Camden Council has used q-bot to insulate council housing without having to move tenants out.

3. Harnessing the power of waves

Sea Wave Energy turns the power of waves into electricity. The company’s latest innovation, designed by Adamos Zakheos, is the WaveLine Magnet – interconnected platforms that stick to the surface of the sea. As waves pass through the platforms, power converts to electricity.

Spokesman Christopher Biggs explains: “Right now wave energy is in its infancy compared to other renewables, but the UK has one of the best wave resources in the world. There is enough wave energy out there to meet 22% of the UK’s electricity needs.”

The next version, with 60 platforms, will be tested at FaBTest, a special wave-testing centre in Falmouth, Cornwall. “It is a low-tech way of producing energy without using fossil fuels ... One of our full-sized arrays will be capable of delivering 30,000 megawatt hours of electricity a year. It can also help prevent erosion by stopping waves lashing against the coast.”

This design means renewable energy can be kept ready for when it’s needed. Salt caverns are already used to store natural gas, but Storelectric is the first company to successfully put air through a compressor and store it at a pressure about 30 times higher than tyre pressure.

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5. Breathing easy

A new startup set to improve our homes is Adaptavate. Founders Thomas Robinson and Alberto Fernandez Minguela have developed a plasterboard replacement made from agricultural waste. Unlike plasterboard, which is classified as hazardous waste, Breathaboard is compostable, so any on-site waste will add nutrients, not pollution, to the soil.

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6. A good egg

People can only save energy if they know how much they are using, and several Cleantech finalists presented products to help with that. The GreenEgg Smart Home Hub displays energy consumption on a TV screen, making it easy for people to see.

Designed for family homes, the GreenEgg Smart Home Hub has a traffic light system that shows red when energy use is high. CEO Rob Merriman explains: “we noticed that many people struggle to engage with their energy use, which can lead to higher bills than expected. There are already devices on smartphones, but only the bill payer sees the information. With GreenEgg you access it with your remote control so it’s on the TV. The whole family can engage with it – especially kids and older people.”